Assuming you are following standard development practices, your component is probably using "system URLs" that look a lot like <tt><nowiki>http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_yourcomponent&view=article&id=1&catid=20&Itemid=50</nowiki></tt>, and your goal is to transform this into <tt><nowiki>http://www.example.com/example-menu-item/20/1</nowiki></tt>. You'll need to write a router, which is a single file (<code>/components/com_yourcomponent/router.php</code>) that transforms system URLs back and forth to human-readable URLs using two functions.

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Assuming you are following standard development practices, your component is probably using "system URLs" that look a lot like <tt><nowiki>http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_yourcomponent&view=article&id=1&catid=20&Itemid=50</nowiki></tt>, and your goal is to transform this into <tt><nowiki>http://www.example.com/example-menu-item/20/1</nowiki></tt>. You'll need to write a router, which is a single file (<tt>/components/com_yourcomponent/router.php</tt>) with two functions that transform system URLs back and forth to human-readable URLs.

The first function, <code>[componentname]BuildRoute(&$query)</code>, must transform an array of URL parameters into an array of segments that will form the URL. Schematically, the transformation works as follows:

The first function, <code>[componentname]BuildRoute(&$query)</code>, must transform an array of URL parameters into an array of segments that will form the URL. Schematically, the transformation works as follows:

<translate> Search engine friendly (SEF), human-readable or clean URLs are URLs that make sense to both humans and search engines because they explain the path to the particular page they point to. Since version 1.5, Joomla! is capable of creating and parsing URLs in any format, including SEF URLs. This does not depend on URL rewriting executed by the web server, so it works even if Joomla! runs a server other than Apache with the mod_rewrite module. The SEF URLs follow a certain fixed pattern, but the user can define a short descriptive text (alias) for each segment of the URL.

Internally, the local part of a SEF URL (the part after the domain name) is called a route. Creating and processing SEF URLs is therefore referred to as routing, and the relevant code is called a router. </translate>

In Joomla!, each component is responsible for handling its own human-readable URLs. Therefore, as the developer of a component, you will have to create your own router to allow your component to use human-readable URLs.

The Concept

Assuming you are following standard development practices, your component is probably using "system URLs" that look a lot like http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_yourcomponent&view=article&id=1&catid=20&Itemid=50, and your goal is to transform this into http://www.example.com/example-menu-item/20/1. You'll need to write a router, which is a single file (/components/com_yourcomponent/router.php) with two functions that transform system URLs back and forth to human-readable URLs.

The first function, [componentname]BuildRoute(&$query), must transform an array of URL parameters into an array of segments that will form the URL. Schematically, the transformation works as follows:

The second function, [componentname]ParseRoute($segments), must transform an array of segments back into an array of URL parameters. Schematically:

http://www.example.com/example-menu-item/20/1

↓ Joomla's internal routing

$segments = array(20, 1);

↓ Your router's com_yourcomponentParseRoute

$query = array('view' => 'article', 'id' => 1, 'catid' => 20)

The two functions must cooperate in such a way that the original URL can be reconstructed. You can think of BuildRoute as a form of encoding and ParseRoute as the corresponding decoding. When the original URL isn't properly reproduced, your component will stop working.

Preparing Your Data for Routing

The Alias

The first step is the generation of the so called alias. The alias is used in the URL instead of the title (the alias is the text you want to have in the URL). The alias has to be URI safe, which means accented UTF­8 characters are replaced by their ASCII­7 equivalents, white spaces by hyphens, etc.

The alias can be defined by the user, but you should ensure that the above requirements for a URL safe alias are met. A good way to do so is to use the JTable::check() method during the save process. Have a look at this example code:

If the alias field is empty the title will be used as alias. Then the alias will be made URLSafe using the JFilterOutput::stringURLSafe() method.

The Slug

Continuing with the same example, the "slug" - "1­:welcome­-to­-joomla" has two parts. The first part is the article identifier (id) and the second is the alias. They are separated by a colon. These two elements were combined during the database query in the model:

Routing URLs

The JRoute::_ method translates the internal Joomla! URL to a custom URL. JRoute has three parameters and its prototype is:

JRoute::_($url,$xhtml=true,$ssl=null);

Where:

$url is a string containing the absolute or relative internal Joomla! URL.

$xhtml is a boolean value that specifies whether or not the output should be in XHTML. This parameter is optional and if omitted defaults to true.

$ssl is an integer value that specifies whether the URI should be secure. It should be set to 1 to force the URI to be secure using the global secure site URI, 0 to leave it in the same state as when it was passed, and -1 to force the URI to be unsecure using the global unsecure site URI.

The most important parameter is $url. A call to this method might look like:

JRoute::_('index.php?view=article&id='.$row->slug);

$row-­>slug is the value that was generated in step 2 from a combination of id and title alias.

Another advantage of using JRoute is that the router now handles $option (the component name) and the $Itemid (the menu item ID). The component itself doesn’t have to know its name ($option) or the active menu item ($Itemid) like it did in previous version of Joomla!.

It is important that you think about the sequence of the URL parameter in this stage. This will be more clear when we have a deeper look at the router.php in the next section.

The building process of JRouter is divided into two steps:

Create the application route. The application route is fully handled by JRouter and the component developer doesn’t have to do anything to make it work.

Create the component route. To create the component route, JRouter looks for the router.php in the component directory which is responsible for building the route for the component.

The Component Router

We will have two functions in the router.php. One is responsible for building the URL and the other is responsible for parsing it. In the next examples, a very basic and a more advanced one, we assume that we have three views that links can point to. The first is a categories overview (view=categories), the second is a single category (view=category) and the third is a single article (view=article).

The file router.php should be in the site area of your component. It is not used on admin/backend pages. Don't forget to add it to your installation XML in the site folder.

A Simple Example

This simple example will illustrate the basics of implementing a router for your component.

JRouter passes a $query array to the [componentname]BuildRoute function. This function will add the relevant parts of the array to the $segments array in the right order and will return the properly ordered array. The content of the $query array needs to be unset, otherwise JRouter will add it to the URL in the form of a query string (i.e. any variables that are not handled by the router will be passed in the query string).

The prefix componentname is the name for your component, as found in the directory holding the component's files. For instance, a component "Magic" in directory /components/com_magic/... would use a prefix magic (all lower case).

What happens here? In the function [componentname]BuildRoute we arranged the items in the $query array in a specific sequence. This means that in this example the view is first and the id is second in the array.

By reading $segments[0], we access the name of the view. We set the right view and/or identifier depending on its value and we return the $vars array to JRouter. $vars should be an associative array similar to the array that was passed to the BuildRoute method.

The above example of the router.php is a very simple way to generate sef URL's but should show how this works quite clearly.

The generated URL in this example contains the name of the view and doesn't reflect the content hierarchy:

http://www.example.com/[menualias]/[view]/[slug]

A More Advanced Example

In the next example we will try to get rid of the need for the view and we will try to reflect the current hierarchy level in the URL.

The goal is URL's that look like:

When viewing an article: http://www.example.com/[menualias]/[category]/[article]

When viewing a category: http://www.example.com/[menualias]/[category]

When viewing the categories overview: http://www.example.com/[menualias]

The difference now is that we don’t add the name of the view to the $segments array. We still unset the view key since otherwise, JRouter would add it to the URL as part of the query string. Another new thing here is the additional parameter catid that we push into the $segments array.

You can see that this ParseRoute function has a lot of different code parts in comparison to the previous. The reason for this is simple. We don’t have the name of the view in the $segments array and we need to find another way to determine it.

We need to find out which level of hierarchy we are in by receiving the root element. We do this by looking to the view name of the active menu item:

$item-­>query['view']

Also we need to know the number of items in the $segments array:

$count=count($segments);

With this information we can correctly set the view for all possible three cases:

The menu item is a link to the categories view and the $segments array has two items ($catid and $id). In this case we know that we need to parse a link to an article .

The menu item is a link to the categories view and the $segments array has one item ($id). In this case we know that we need to parse a link to a category.

The menu item is a link to a category. In this case, we know that any item in the $segments array is the identifier for an article .

The result of all this code is nice and human readable component URL's.

Application Route Parsing

The Application execution order outlines that the route (URL) is parsed immediately after initialisation is complete. Since fancy URL's are not treated (yet) in the Administrator, we will follow the route parsing process in detail when JSite::route in the index.php file.